Icons and Instincts

Vincent Paterson

Description

For the first time, the choreographer of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Björk and many others reveals stage stories through his extraordinary journey.

Vincent Paterson began his professional dancing career late in life. It would take an exceptional turn when he became one of the lead dancers in Michael Jackson's Beat It music video. Through hard work, he rises to the rank of choreographer and director for the world's greatest singers, but also for cinema and musical comedy.

He tells with humility the fascinating universe of film sets, the rehearsal sessions where he had to orchestrate and synchronize dozens of dancers, life backstage where it is sometimes necessary to manage a few whims of the stars, his successes and his disappointments. It is a dive into the heart of the world of dance.

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Biography
• Entertainment
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Bird Books
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644283271
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book
Rare Bird Books 6044 North Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90042 rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2022 by Vincent Paterson and Amy Tofte
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address: Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department 6044 North Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90042
Set in Dante
Cover photographs by Herb Ritts, Kim Kaufman, Antony Payne, Zentropa, and Sam Emerson
Author photograph © 2022 Sethaffoumado.com
epub isbn : 9781644283271
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paterson, Vincent, author. | Tofte, Amy, author. Title: Icons and instincts : dancing, divas & directing and choreographing entertainment’s biggest stars / by Vincent Paterson and Amy Tofte. Description: Los Angeles : Rare Bird Books, 2022. Identifiers: LCCN 2022000483 | ISBN 9781644282632 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Patterson, Vincent. | Dance in motion pictures, television, etc. | Choreographers—United States—Biography. Classification: LCC GV1785.P2854 A3 2022 | DDC 792.8/2092 [B]--dc23/eng/20220201
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000483


For my three angels:
Dorothy Caruso, Leslie Kaeufer, Rene Lamontagne.
—Vincent Paterson
For all the kids from the small towns who dream of something bigger.
—Amy Tofte


Contents
Introduction
1.
Having No Talent and Too Old to Dance
2.
The Boy Most Like Jesus Comes to Hollywood
3.
M(adonna) is for Muse
4.
Let’s Get Physical
5.
Shirley, Diana, and Hal…Oh, My!
6.
The Electric Socket of Creativity
7.
Santa Evita
8.
When Instinct Grabs You by the Throat
9.
Choreographers Still Don’t Get Oscars
10.
A Danish, an Eskimo Pie, and Buttons for Lunch
10½.
One Hundred Cameras. Really.
11.
From Russia with Love
12.
Come to the Cabaret
13.
More Michael
14.
Gurus and Guiding Lights
15.
Entrances and Exits
Timeline
Acknowledgments



Introduction
H ey, Vincent,” Madonna once said to me, “you know what your problem is? You don’t know how interesting you are.”
I’ve never cared about being interesting; I’ve cared about creating good work. But I sure hope I’m interesting because I just wrote this book.
You might not recognize my name, but billions of people have seen my work. That’s not a typo…billions. Some of my creations might be on your list of ten favorite moments in film or music video history. You might have practiced some of my iconic dance moves in front of your mirror at home.
I’ve worked with innumerable pop, rock, theater, film, and sports stars from 1980 to the present as a dancer, actor, director, and choreographer. Some of those relationships, at times, felt closer than family. I interacted with some celebrities and pop stars in ways I never imagined I would. As a choreographer and director, my role is usually behind the scenes, making the stars shine brighter. I saw behind the veneer of their fame and witnessed their artistic process. I’m grateful for every moment.
This book is a collection of stories from my career as I remember them, anecdotes I’ve been sharing with my closest friends over the years. It’s not always chronological, but sometimes memory jumps around to tell the best stories. Making it in Hollywood is tough, but every success and every failure has a story behind it. Those of us in this business wouldn’t trade it for anything—even at its worst—because there’s nothing like it.
My wish is that these recollections might offer insight into what it means to be a working artist in this volatile industry. My career even provides a bit of a time capsule for American pop culture from the 1980s to today. I encourage you to have fun and Google things as you go, so much of my creative life is archived on fan pages and YouTube links, even some of the obscure performances from the late 1970s.
Mostly, I hope my stories entertain you, maybe even inspire you to follow your own passion, a reminder of how we each choreograph the steps to our individual dances in life.
And you might learn, as I have, that we can all take a few life lessons from a diva.
Or two.


1.
Having No Talent and Too Old to Dance
The winding road to “Beat It”
M y father, also named Vincent Paterson, was tall, handsome, and danced better than anyone around. He was well-known in the area for teaching social dance at Dupont Country Club, and his students loved his infectious charm. But he was different at home where he ruled over us with an iron fist at all times. “In this house,” he’d boom, “I’m God! You do as I say! You don’t ask questions!”
This was Brookhaven, Pennsylvania (1950 population: 1,042), a blue-collar town along the Delaware River, eighteen miles outside Philadelphia. My mother, Dorothy Caruso, was a petite beauty with dark hair and porcelain skin. They met at an Italian social hall where they fell in love dancing to a fifteen-piece band. They married in 1948, just after my mother graduated high school. I was born two years later.
I grew up the eldest of three brothers—Bill, Kent, and Kerry—and a sister, Leslie. We cherished our often shy, reserved mother; however, because of Dad, our home was a regular battleground of ferocious words, overturned Thanksgiving dinners, and yanked-down Christmas trees. Dad had believed he was destined for earth-shattering fame, not the crowded life we lived in a tiny two-bedroom house with only one bathroom. If he felt in any way disrespected, my brothers and I were brutally beaten with metal cooking utensils and thick leather belts.
Dad taught dance classes late into the night, often returning home drenched in perfume. My mother’s usual calm would erupt into raging fury, “I know you’re having an affair with your dance partner, Mr. Big Shit!” From the top of the stairs, we’d witness deafening arguments that always came to blows. “Shut the fuck up, woman, or I swear to Christ I’ll have to hit you! Do you hear me?” I can still hear his voice.
We’d clasp our toy guns in the shadows and whisper, “Let’s kill him!” He regularly punched my mother in the face, ripped her handmade dresses, or threw her out into the snow. If we ran down the stairs to let her back in the house, we’d be flung against the walls. From the upstairs window, we’d look down at Mom in her robe, shivering in the snowy darkness, all of us crying together.
We were forever being picked up by a family member and driven to my nan’s house in the middle of the night, but we’d always return to the combat zone at 217 Morris Avenue. Divorce wasn’t customary in the 1950s, but as we got older we begged Mom to get one. They finally did when I was fourteen, and we all breathed lighter air.
After that, Dad dropped in on occasion to give Mom child support, but even if the outright physical abuse had stopped, his emotional claws found their way into us throughout the rest of his life. As a kid, I had learned all the social dances he taught. During the eighties (and once I started having a dance career in Hollywood), I developed a more civil relationship with him, although his pompousness remained constant. When I visited Pennsylvania, Dad would treat me to lunch at a local diner. He’d loudly say to a waitress, “Miss. Miss. Do you recognize him?” as he pointed to me.
“Um, no…should I?”
“Have you seen ‘Beat It’? He’s the white gang leader in Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ video. The knife fight guy. Did you know that?”
“Uh…no.”
I would nod, politely, embarrassed, then urge him not to do it anymore. “But everyone should know who you are,” he would say, as if it were about me. It was always about him.
My father died from cirrhosis at seventy-nine, alcoholism. He had danced and taught through bouts of cancer and diabetes. I am grateful to have inherited his dancing DNA. But I never understood his violence.
After the divorce, I discovered acting at Brookhaven Junior High and then Sun Valley High School. From my James Dean role in Rebel Without a Cause to a lawyer in The Night of January 16th , inhabiting characters and investing in lives far from my own rescued me. I became addicted to the magic of theater.
I also became the father figure of our house. It was tough to be a disciplinarian and still a friend to my younger siblings. By sixteen, I was working at the Dairy Queen and used some of the money I earned to take acting classes at the nearby Hedgerow Theater. I made the four-mile walk from my house once a week during my seventeenth summer. My eighty-year-old acting teacher, Jasper Deeter, best known for his role in The Blob , was thin as a skeleton and the creaky, old theater felt like a haunted house.
In 1968, I prepared to attend Dickinson College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. My father told me he could only afford to give me one thousand dollars toward tuition for all four years. So I applied for scholarships and financial aid. One scholarship I received was from the local Lions Club that gave one hundred dollars to one male student from the graduating senior class who needed financial support for continuing education. In the late sixties, this was a lot of money because annual tuition at Dickinson would have been around $3,500. I was invited to attend a Lions Club luncheon to receive their award and was asked to bring my father.
After lunch, the Lions Club president rose and said, “We want to give this award to Vincent Paterson because…” I stood up, graciously accepted the check, thanking the club members as I explained how this would really help because I needed the financial assistance. Just as I took my seat… Ding